here and there, of some chalk sketches on
the carriages--heads of pigs in spiked helmets, and the inscription,
"To Berlin!"--the only things which slightly indicate where we are
going.

The train sets off. We who have just got in crowd to the windows and
try to look outside, towards the level crossing where, perhaps, the
people in whom we live are still watching for us; but the eye can no
longer pick up anything but a vague stirring, shaded with crayon and
jumbled with nature. We are blind and we fall back each to his place.
When we are enveloped in the iron-hammered rumble of advance, we fix up
our luggage, arrange ourselves for the night, smoke, drink and talk.
Badly lighted and opaque with fumes, the compartment might be a corner
of a tavern that has been caught up and swept away into the unknown.

Some conversation mixes its rumble with that of the train. My
neighbors talk about crops and sunshine and rain. Others, scoffers and
Parisians, speak of popular people and principally of music-hall
singers. Others sleep, lying somehow or other on the wood. Their open
mouths make murmur, and the oscillation jerks them without tearing them
from their torpor. I go over in my thoughts the details of the last
day, and even my memories of times gone by when there was nothing going
on.

* * * * * *

We traveled all night. At long intervals some one would let a window
drop at a station; a damp and cavernous breath would penetrate the
overdone atmosphere of the carriage. We saw darkness and some porter's
lantern dancing in the abyss of night.

Several times we made very long halts--to let the trains of regular
troops go by. In one station where our train stood for hours, we saw
several of them go roaring by in succession. Their speed blurred the
partitions between the windows and the huge vertebrae of the coaches,
seeming to blend together the soldiers huddled there; and the glance
which plunged into the train's interior descried, in its feeble and
whirling illumination, a long, continuous and tremulous chain, clad in
blue and red. Several times on the journey we got glimpses of these
interminable lengths of humanity, hurled by machinery from everywhere
to the frontiers, and almost towing each other.

CHAPTER X

THE WALLS

At daybreak there was a stop, and they said to us, "You're there."

We got out, yawning, our teeth chattering, and grimy with night, on to
a pla